Heating and decoherence suppression using decoupling techniques

We study the application of decoupling techniques to the case of a damped vibrational mode of a chain of trapped ions, which can be used as a quantum bus in linear ion trap quantum computers. We show that vibrational heating could be efficiently suppressed using appropriate ``parity kicks''. We also show that vibrational decoherence can be suppressed by this decoupling procedure, even though this is generally more difficult because the rate at which the parity kicks have to applied increases with the effective bath temperature.